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Although the concept seems simple, the motion of bulk materials in a rotating drum is rather complex. In this paper, the process of throwing the evenly mixed materials out of a horizontally rotating mixing tank with internal baffles was concerned. The reasonable rotary speeds for the discharging process as well as the ideal process durations were quantitatively determined by running simulations based on the Discrete Element Method (DEM) software PFC3D. The particle-counting codes, developed in PFC3D built-in programming language FISH, took important roles in evaluating the corresponding effects of different process parameters, which overcame the uncertainty of usual qualitative analysis of simulation results.

How to get the best uniformity in the shortest time has always been a hot and difficult point in the quantitative analysis of bulk mixing process using rotating drum. With the advent of Discrete Element Method (DEM), the mixing behavior of particle material in blender has been extensively studied these years. In this paper, the reasonable rotary speeds for blending process as well as the ideal process durations of a horizontally rotating drum with internal baffles in batch mode are quantitatively determined by running simulations based on DEM software PFC3D. The particle-counting codes, developed in PFC3D built-in programming language FISH, take important roles in evaluating the corresponding effects of different process parameters, which overcomes the uncertainty of usual qualitative analysis of simulation results.